Antisemitism in the Postwar Period. The Case of Friedrich Nieland

Source Description

In early 1957, Hamburg timber merchant
Friedrich Nieland
distributed a 39-page brochure titled “How Many World (Money) Wars Must the
Peoples of the World Lose? Open Letter to All Government
Ministers and Members of Parliament of the
Federal
Republic.” The brochure was published with a print run of 2,000
copies by nationalist publisher
Adolf Ernst Peter Heimberg (printer: W.-Heimberg) of Stade and subsequently
mailed to the addressees mentioned in the title. Nieland’s pamphlet includes
a compilation of letters Nieland had addressed to the Federal
Chancellor, the President of the German
Bundestag, and the Minister of the
Interior since the negotiations on compensation
had begun between Israel and the Federal Republic in
1952 as well as brief confirmations of receipt. His
“open letter” consists of a collage of quotes and illustrations taken from
publications by various authors, some of them obscure, some serious. Nieland joins these
together by passages of his own writing in which he declares the Holocaust the
work of Jews and characterizes “the international Jews” as some sort of secret
government steering world politics. According to him, they had instigated “World
(Money) Wars” with the ultimate aim of destroying Germany. Nieland criticizes
politicians’ silence on the matter (p. 5) and explains his motive for writing
this pamphlet was to expose the truth about the Holocaust. Both Nieland and Heimberg were charged with anti-constitutional acts
and libel, but a full trial was never held. In 1959,
the brochure was confiscated by the Federal Court of Justice
(BGH) due to its seditious content.

Nieland’s
conspiracy theories

Nieland’s letter is a
classic example for a text informed by conspiracy theory which, motivated by
antisemitic rejection of any responsibility, denies or reinterprets the
Holocaust. In it, he states that the German people, and all of humanity even,
found itself in “terrible chaos” (p. 3) at the time. He identifies its creators
as key advisors in world politics working anonymously. The only example he
quotes is “the Jew Dr. “Salomon
Friedlaender” (aka Mynona—which if read the “Jewish” way, i.e.
from right to left, spells “anonym”
[anonymous]), who “really was Hitler’s invisible puppet master” and whom he repeatedly refers
to as a kind of “chief witness” for his hypotheses (p. 3). Nieland uses the name of
philosopher and author
Salomon Friedlaender,
who published some of his literary works under the pseudonym “Mynona” in the
first half of the 20th
century and who died in exile in Paris in 1946. Like all conspiracy theorists and Holocaust
deniers, Nieland
argues that his claim was “not just hot air, it is the truth” (p. 3.) The German
people, which had been “collectively convicted [...] as a “nation of war criminals”, had become the victim of an egregious lie
“about the gassing and slaughter of six million Jews by Germans” (p. 3). Making
reference to the circle around Mathilde Ludendorff and the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,”
Nieland turns out
to be an early proponent of the hypothesis that the mass extermination was
really organized by a secretly ruling clique of Jewish leaders as imagined in
the “Elders of Zion.” He expressly names “the Zionist Dr. Kastner” and Adolf Eichmann, whom he
claims to be of Jewish descent. In his mind, the “lie” he refers to is therefore
“one of the most diabolic dirty tricks “International Jewry” has played in order
to conceal its crimes against Germany” (p. 3). In the
classic manner of conspiracy theorists, he cites supposed evidence, often taken
from Jewish writings, for the “extermination maneuver” plotted by the conspiracy
of “International Jewry” (p. 4). Thus Nieland, referring to Kabbalah, constructs anagrams
by “deciphering” the word “National Socialist,” for example, as “O! Zionist à la
Stalin” (p. 13). In his first letter written in 1952,
Nieland had
warned the Federal Chancellor against signing the
reparations treaty with Israel by pointing out the “financing of Hitler by Jews from the
USA” (p. 7),
which is a reference to antisemitic conspiracy theories revolving around “the
Jewish plutocrats of Wall
Street.” He subsequently wrote letters of similar content to
government ministers and members of
parliament. The main section of this letter, which was addressed
to Gerhard Schröder
(CDU), then
Minister of the Interior (pp. 9–37), is a confused
compilation of completely absurd statements as well as quotations and
caricatures clipped from various publications, all of which are meant to prove
his thesis of an “International Jewish conspiracy” as the true masterminds
behind Hitler and thus
responsible for the Second World
War, fascism, and the Holocaust. They had not only deceived the
Germans, but also “the majority of the Jewish people” (p. 6). His letter closes
with an address to the members of parliament, whom he
intended to give some starting points in order to pursue their own
investigations in this matter. He emphasizes the urgency of the matter since
what was at stake was no less than “the survival of the white race!,” which was
threatened by “Jewish designs on the world” (p. 38). Jewish high finance was
about to realize its dictatorial intentions and to “openly dictate its laws to
the world” (p. 39).

Reactions and debates

On April 4, 1957, a brief report on the
confiscation of an antisemitic brochure had appeared in the newspaper Frankfurter
Rundschau. On the same day, Helmut Schmidt
(SPD), then a member of parliament
from Hamburg,
addressed a question “regarding the brochure by a Mr. Friedrich Nieland from
Hamburg-Wellingsbüttel” to the Minister of the
Interior, who stated that the brochure was known to the Ministry of the Interior
(BMI), that Hamburg’s criminal investigation
department had confiscated it and that the public prosecutor’s office
had instituted proceedings against Nieland for violation of
§130 StGB [criminal code], a provision against
“incitement to class struggle” dating back to 1871, as
well as for other violations. In December 1957, the
public prosecutor’s
office charged Nieland and his printer
Heimberg with anti-constitutional writings and
libel against Jewish citizens. The district court rejected instituting main proceedings, however,
and instead requested a psychiatric assessment, which attested that Nieland did “not suffer
from a pathological mental condition.” Nevertheless, judge
Enno Budde refused to
hold a full trial against him. Despite a complaint by the Attorney
General, the Hanseatic court of appeal confirmed the ruling by the trial
court, which allowed Nieland to continue distributing his inflammatory pamphlet. When
it became public that two courts had failed to charge Nieland and he was thus
free from criminal prosecution, a scandal erupted in January
1959. The district
court’s opinion, according to which Nieland’s call to fight
“International Jewry” was not directed against “the Jewish people” so that a
threat of subversion could not be determined with sufficient certainty, was
considered particularly scandalous. For Hamburg’s
mayor, Max
Brauer (SPD), the matter no longer was the “Nieland case,” but “the
Hamburg
courts case.” During a press conference, both Brauer and Hamburg’s
Senator for Justice distanced themselves from the court
rulings and received broad public support. At the same time, Nieland went public in an
interview with dpa, in which he denied being an antisemite and claimed he
had wanted to help the persecuted Jewish people with his brochure, which was
based on the findings of 30 years of private research.

Lex Nieland

Prompted by this new antisemitic incident, the Central Council of Jews in GermanyZentralrat der
Juden in Deutschland wrote a letter to
Chancellor
Adenauer
(CDU)
demanding immediate legal measures. Thus the “Nieland case” eventually
became the catalyst which led to the government presenting
parliament with a
draft law against incitement of the people, which is why the press called it
“LexNieland.” This
reform, which also considered National Socialism’s previous impact on the law,
was designed to replace the old provision of 1871,
which penalized actions that “incite different classes of the population to
violent actions against one another in a way that jeopardizes the public peace.”
The subsequent public debate mainly focused on two issues: fighting reawakened
antisemitism and the
crisis of the justice system. On January 14,
1959, a “great debate on Justice” [große
Justizdebatte] drawing a large audience was held in Hamburg’s city assembly,
which lamented the court decisions and requested that the senate take steps to prompt
the federal government
in Bonn to amend
existing legislation. The focus of the case increasingly shifted towards a
criticism of specific individuals within the justice system and eventually
became the “Budde
case” since it had now become known that the judge had
praised the Third Reich’s
racial laws in the 1930s and
had also authored antisemitic articles. Thereupon, Budde requested a transfer
to a civil division, which was granted. Hardly anyone paid attention to the fact
that the court of appeal’s
chief judge had been an active National Socialist as well.
The Nieland case
became the subject of a debate on the justice system in the German parliament on January 22, 1959, which met with great public
interest. In this debate, Chancellor
Adenauer issued a
government policy statement on the increasingly occurring antisemitic incidents.
On January 20, 1959, the Federal
Prosecutor General filed his request for an “objective hearing”
with the Federal Court of
Justice in order to confiscate any remaining copies of Nieland’s brochure and have
the printing plates destroyed. In early March of the
same year, the Federal Court of
Justice ruled that Nieland’s pamphlet was subversive and libelous and ordered the
confiscation of all remaining copies. Nieland never again
published any antisemitic writings.

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About the Author

Werner Bergmann (Thematic Focus: Antisemitism and Persecution), Prof., is Professor at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, Technical University of Berlin. His research interests centre on the sociology and history of Antisemitism and related fields, such as racism and right-wing extremism.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the work is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.